Happy Labor Day, fellow Americans. First up, Adam J. White considers the ethics of racing in his review of Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive:

The way we drive our cars increasingly resembles the way we maintain them — which is to say, we do less and less of it. ‘With no shifter and no clutch, you don’t really feel that you are doing anything,’ Crawford observes. ‘This lack of involvement is exacerbated by features that partially automate the driving task, such as cruise control.’ Navigation is largely automated too, thanks to GPS. ‘Between the quiet smoothness, the passivity, and the sense of being cared for by some surrounding entity you can’t quite identify, driving a modern car is a bit like returning to the womb.’

Except for the electronic alerts, which we hear more and more. First limited to reminding you to buckle up, or to turn off that turn signal, now our cars beep to tell us that we’re drifting into the next lane, or that someone’s in our blind spot, or that there’s an object near our fender. These are intended to help, and they do — at least in the short run.

In the longer run, however, these nudges make us worse drivers. Crawford quotes a 2016 study published by the Association for Computing Machinery, which warns that ‘one unintended consequence of alerts and alarm systems is [that] some drivers may substitute the secondary task of listening for alerts and alarms for the primary task of paying attention.’ We become complacent, ill-equipped to actually handle problems when they arise, and ‘the automation’s underlying assumption of our incompetence becomes progressively self-fulfilling.’ We drive ever more powerful cars, yet we assert ever less power over them.

In other news: The El Dorado fire in southern California has already burned over 7,000 acres and caused 3,000 residents to evacuate. What caused it? A “smoke generating pyrotechnic” used at a gender reveal party. This is America, folks.

Gianni Rodari’s Telephone Tales arrives in America: “First published in Italy in 1962, Telephone Tales is a collection of children’s stories intended to be short enough that one could be read during a 20th-century pay phone call, as the Italian title, Favole al telefono, suggests more explicitly. It is also unapologetically political, using unlikely situations and imaginary worlds to prompt readers to question the status quo.”

The estate of T. S. Eliot has donated £20,000 to the Brontë Parsonage: “The Brontë Parsonage Museum in the village of Haworth, West Yorkshire, where the young Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell would act out plays and where the novels Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were written, said that its closure during lockdown had had a devastating financial impact, with a loss of expected income of more than £500,000. Although the museum reopened on 28 August, its small size means visitors have had to be limited for safety reasons. The Brontë Society is forecasting a ‘significant reduction in visitor numbers and associated income’ into 2021.”

“Anarchist harmonica player” (and philosophy prof) Crispin Sartwell wrestles with Jonathan Edwards the philosopher: “The fundamental influence on Edwards the philosopher is Locke, who also emerged from a Puritan background. Edwards studied Newton carefully and agreed with his physics. He read Francis Hutcheson and Lord Shaftesbury, and developed a feet-on-the-ground utilitarian ethics that owed a lot to the former. When engaged in philosophical argument, he wrote as clearly and reasoned as ingeniously as his contemporaries George Berkeley and Hume. In A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the modern prevailing notions of that freedom of will, which is supposed to be essential to moral agency, virtue and vice, reward and punishment, praise and blame (usually known as Freedom of the Will) of 1754, Edwards presents the most elaborate version of compatibilism – the view that freedom is compatible with determinism, the position of Hobbes, Locke, and Hume – of the eighteenth century. It is a matter of some scholarly dispute whether Edwards read Hume, whose books were emerging in the same period that Edwards was writing on these topics. But if he didn’t, he developed many similar ideas and arguments independently. And if he did, he takes the Humean arguments in some unexpected directions.”

Janet Malcolm writes about the time she went to a speech coach for help in a libel lawsuit: “My visits to Sam Chwat were part of the half-year of preparation for the second trial, almost like a military campaign, to which Bostwick and I devoted ourselves. Sam was the Professor Higgins who would transform me from the defensive loser I had been in the first trial to the serene winner I would be (and was!) in the second one. The transformation had two parts. The first was the erasure of the New Yorker image of the writer as a person who does not go around showing off how great and special he or she is. No! A trial jury is like an audience at a play that wants to be entertained. Witnesses, like stage actors, have to play to that audience if their performances are to be convincing. At the first trial I had been scarcely aware of the jury. When Morgan questioned me, I responded to him alone. Sam Chwat immediately corrected my misconception of whom to address: the jury, only the jury. As Morgan had been using me to communicate to the jury, I would need to learn how to use him to do the same.”

The paradoxes of Graham Greene: “Congenitally elusive, he refused to appear on television. ‘I feel I’ve got a copyright on my life,’ he explained to me, ‘and that people I know should have a copyright on theirs.’ How much of his secretiveness was vanity is hard to tell. Unable to pronounce the letter ‘r’, his instinct was for self-effacement — ‘I am so shy’ were his first words to Kim Philby’s Russian wife. Yet co-habiting the same skin — ‘faintly sunburned, with the texture of fine dry silk’, recalled one mistress, Jocelyn Rickards — there writhed a provocative exhibitionist whose love-making with Rickards as they travelled first-class by train to Southend was conducted in blatant view of those on the platforms.” 

Photos: Louisiana

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